Feedback, part one

As you’re probably aware, I do have a link for comments at the end of each entry of this weblog. As you’re probably also aware, the comments service to which I subscribe often doesn’t work, and when it does work, it often does so very slowly. I am of the “blogs as conversation” school of thought, so with that in mind, I thought I’d highlight or answer some comments that have been posted in the past few days.

Obsessed with high school?

In reponse to Monday, February 17th’s Why Nerds are Unpopular, my friend and former coworker Patrick Lee wrote:

Ok, I held my breath and counted to a large number before posting this… but I have a question- how come people 20 years younger than me (ie Joey) seem so obessed with what went on in High School? I mean, it is only 4 or 5 years out of even a 30 year old life. I am pretty sure that if the categories had existed I would have been a geek, nerd whatever in Grade 11 at least- a few friends sitting at the same cafeteria table decided we should be “nebbishes” which is even lower in Yiddish. But, I graduated, and I honestly don’t think I have spent more than 12 hours since then (counting writing this) thinking about what went on from Grades 9 to 13. So, what’s the big deal?

For the record, in sixteen months of blogging with entries almost every day, making for almost 500 in total, here’s the number of weblog entries I’ve written about my life in high school:

ZERO.

If you count the entries about my snow-cone selling job, which took place on summer vacation from high school, you’d have a grand total of three. Throw in the Why Nerds are Unpopular essay and that makes four. That’s a very teeny percentage out of 500-ish entries.

If writing about a given topic less than one percent of the time qualifies as obsession, it’s time to rewrite Freud’s line as “a cigar is always your father’s penis”.

The article was interesting to me not for the high school aspect, but for these reasons:

• It’s about nerds. I’m interested.
• It’s about social standing, navigating the choppy waters of cliques, social kindnesses and cruelties and the nature of popularity. I also find these interesting.
• This essay was quite a departure from his usual topics. Normally Paul Graham writes about technical matters, such as the Lisp programming language and ways of stopping spam.
• It’s very surprising to read a Paul Graham article that doesn’t make me wish I had a long-distance slapping device. Yes, there are still traces of “I am much smarter than you” in the essay, but he’s nowhere as bad as he used to be.

Getting back to the topic of high school: while it was interesting and formative, life didn’t become really interesting until the summer after high school, it became more so after I switched university degree programs (from electrical engineering to computer science) and even more so after my friend Rob said “I have an old accordion in my basement. Do you want it?”

Simply put, I’ve given more thought to learning the chords to Avril Lavigne’s Sk8r Boi in the past week than I did to high school in the past year. Whether this is a productive use of my leisure time is still up for debate.

My question is: Patrick, what aspects of high school are your friends so obsessed about?